We drive through a swarm of bees and they become liquid smudges on the windscreen – little mustard smears.
For breakfast we have taken to having fruit chopped into bite sized pieces with greek yogurt and drizzled with honey. Blood orange, blueberries, pink lady apples. The honey needs to be exceptional. It follows on from G’s greek sailing adventure and Jean’s morning ritual. Although Jean ate it at break neck speed, shovelled it in like fuel, which is saying something, if G thought so.
It is breakfast food for older people. Ones with middle aged paunches.
As is the pastime of birding.
G tells me the sound is that of a bronzewing. It is incessant and mournful and must take some effort and stamina. Endless cooing.
When we walk the forrest there is lots of stopping and looking up, listening and peering. Waiting.
A thumping is heard. It is the nearby bounding of a kangaroo through the bush. Lola is all aquiver in anticipation. What on earth? She doesn’t know it could kill her in an instant. She would love to chase it anyway. Her brain is exploding with possibility. Her tail is so upright and curled and it too quivers, scorpion strike.
Avocados grow on the hillsides and the fruit hang like bull balls.
We wonder how they are harvested and google they are picked by hand. Seriously. We buy some from a farm gate honesty stall.
Lola sees her first horse. What on earth?
Trump pontificates on how he has made “peace” in the middle east with the help of his pal Bibi. With his orange face and his pouty lips he talks about all the “great guys” on his team. There’s lots of standing and clapping and when he is heckled and the man is removed he compliments the Israelis on their efficiency. Twenty Israeli hostages have been returned to their families. Around 70 000 Palestinians have died.
There is more water in dams and dams are bigger down here. Moss and lichens grows on fallen trees and within the crevices of the gnarly bark on the tree trunks. Except for the smooth grey surface of the karri trees. They soar forever straight. Vertical sublime. European sublime. Lain horizontal though to pave Australian and English roads before their value was known, appreciated. Not able to be regrown once sundered. A giant even turned to paper and pulp.
Leave me to stand to be a home for bees. Scupper me not.
Listening to Joep Beving – till eyes fill with water.
Fill a small saucepan, pasta for one.
Neighbour buys me a half loaf of sourdough when she goes to Wild.
The port siren sounds, winds exceed.
The socials are bricked. No cat adding a mouse to a pot on the boil. No super yacht sinking within 15 minutes of entering the water for the first time.
I am practicing German short rows.
The dog has drugs on board so sleeps.
The bamboo falls over in the wind and smashes a flower pot.
This is a luxury that few can/do indulge in. We have seen the chalets next to us empty over and over again; the fresh sheets deposited, the cleaners come in, play loud music and bang around indoors. Slam doors. Clean?
Most people seem to only have a few days, and the lucky ones an entire week but we have 14 impossible days. Fourteen! So long, that when the holiday begins there is no counting down. This really does make the unwinding easy.
It is hot, sure here, but worse on the mainland. A plume of heavy smoke rises from the mainland then drifts and fades across the horizon, and a bush fire is presumed. It is a long way away. Fire is frequent. Perth is a tinder box. No longer is it a surprise to hear the radio give a warning to “leave now or be prepared to defend your home”. “It is no longer safe to leave, choose a room with two exits and running water.” Good grief.
Our tenant in Fremantle has a broken air-conditioner. No air conditioner at Longreach and fans with cut off arms that blow mere wisps of warm air. But we have the sea a few metres from our door. From here organising a new Daikin is a challenge. G has Telstra, check the reviews. In this heat the quotes go through the roof. Ten grand! “It’s brutal” writes the tenant:, the heat, even in Freo. We can plonk ourselves in when the heat overtakes us. We can get a fancy Campari drink with a slice of orange and lots of ice and carry it to the beach and sit in the water whilst wearing prescription sunnies and a hat!
by Graham Miller
If Rottnest were to burn I imagine sitting here in the safety of the blue water, delivered here swiftly through the muscles of others, safe all the same. Different if a plane were to go down I sometimes think. Would I be abandoned by the rush of people to get away from the burning craft and down the inflatable slide. I am amused and thankful the way airline staff instruct me that in an emergency they will assist me, but really? I might succumb. I am ready to go down with the plane.
The water has been clear and the reeds wave underneath as I swim. Languid. Me in slow motion. Mike says it is good to swim with me. Slow. No pressure. Sometimes there are silver fish near the surface and bigger blotchy well-disguised ones in the seagrass. The snorkelers know their names. There are rays too. The bird watchers spot a black shoulder kite and a kingfisher.
Something happens around middle age when men (and some women, although decidedly less I think) become fascinated by birds of the feathered kind; seeing them, hearing them, pointing them out, offering the binoculars to the less fascinated. There are binoculars that you can get that tell you the name of the bird you are looking at. Does that spoil the not knowing? There is an app that can identify them by the sound they make. It confuses the hell out of the birds too as they hear some other non existent bird chirping back at them. There is an app that you can point to the stars in the night sky and be told what is the star you are looking at. Jupiter! There is an app that tells you what the ship sliding across the horizon is called and where’s its home port and what cargo it carries. (We keep track of the jilted sheep carrier that has drifted back and forth for over a month now while no one with authority knows what should be done. And the sheep are just fine, far away enough from shore not to pique any nostrils.)There’s an app that Jane uses to teach herself Spanish (it dings and pings) and a word game that Liz plays. G has several to work through each morning and the list is growing
G has a manuscript to read. I have read mine. But first he has worldle and wordle and quordle and squaredle and…
My phone is only receiving SOS and hence I have no apps. App-less. This is a welcomed unburdening. At least I will know about The Fire if it hits.
A misty rain has fallen on the last day and I wonder if the chalk has been wiped from the road. “Henry and Charlie Stop” with a solid line and repeated a few hundred metres further on. Is this a parent’s instruction to small children to not go further or is this part of a game, a race between small boys that marks a beginning and an end? Is this a worried mother who does not realise that there is no need for barriers and rules at Rottnest. As long as the kid can swim.
Tourists get unbearably close to the quokkas. So close they are almost kissing the comatosed marsupial, down on their hands and knees with their phone in the face of the small unmoving critter. We have Federer to blame for this phenomenon. Despite the signage there is still petting and poking, allowing sips of water from takeaway cups, bowls put out beside chalets.
G hates a cabana. He especially hates the blue and white stripes. An almost identical structure, but of a solid colour does not get the same derision as the blue and white cabana.
A bird has pooed on our bedsheet. It must have made its way through the open window to see what goodies could be had. It is a big poo with sand in it and we presume it is a seagull till the raven shows itself as a thief on other persons balconies. Smart not scared, ballsy birds. King of birds. Argh Argh.
On the shore line, a baby seagull, although as big as his mother, beeps continuously at the nurturing bird. It follows and squeaks at her. It bothers her about her bill. She moves her head away and sometimes steps away from him but the baby is always there, right behind or beside her. Clamped on. Mum, Mum. Sometimes she flies off and then the baby is immediately silent as if the cry would tell other birds he was vulnerable and alone. He is only annoying and a cry baby when his mother is right there. Sound familiar?
There was a time when I could climb the hills with the power of my own shoulders but now like others I have lithium. All sorts zoom by on all sorts of powered mobiles and I wonder when as a species we will give up legs entirely. G makes the effort still and despite a back pack the weight of a coke drinking toddler he is determined to make every hill, not rising from the saddle, like Lance’s great rival. No one recalls his name.
Mother to small school age girls at the stairs that lead to the beach:
“Look where you are?”
“Your friends are back in Perth on the oval, the oval!”
“You are by the ocean!”
She pleads with them not to splash her, she’s exhausted.
She gets up from a cross-legged position effortlessly, no hands.
This is one of the things I am looking for. How easily do people get up and down from the sand? Do you have to roll over onto your hands and knees and push up? Do you ask your partner to give you their outstretched hand? This skill might save you from an old person’s home. Practice now. Get up off the floor and keep doing it. Whatever way you can. On your own.
Instead the older people stand on the beach. They contemplate getting down. You can see it cross their mind. But then wonder if they will ever get up again. It is along way down and even a longer way up. Instead stand around for a short while, make like you want to dry off, that you don’t like the sand, then go back to the chalet. Or buy a chair.
Small child to other small child on balcony:
“Josh, if there is a fire on the balcony, what would you rather? Burn or Jump off?”
For two days I have pain. So much pain that I could hardly roll over in the bed. I lay there and wondered if I should go home early. But that would mean busting in on J and his lemon tart party. G is at the golf course while the fog still hangs across the greens. Why be here in pain? Like the school children. Look where you are. If you can rise from the bed? Can you see the ocean from the bed? A swim helps, stretches, pain killers. Swimming. The ocean the great healer. Each stroke. A balm for more than muscle.
We talk about swimming. Always how? How to continuously stay afloat without pain, with breath, without exhaustion, with ease. Imagine swimming the Rotto Swim? He has filmed me. Really am I that slow? Did you take it in slow motion? No. I film G and later we look at the film. It is a blurred pink thumb of mine across the lens. His stroke is there, somewhere, behind my thumb. Ha. We laugh. Really laugh, deep down in the belly. That is good for your swimming. Laughing.
by Graham Miller
Tonight the sea breeze is in. We haven’t had it for days and mostly the bay has been a hazy blue and purple. It has been slick and smooth. Cataract blue. There is the slap of the waves on the shore line and the incessant thwack of flyscreen doors that cannot close properly. We have new neighbours and their children freely roam the beach and paddle out to a boat a father has motored over in. There was some early tension over the getting of the key and the usual palaver over credentials not sighted but all is recovered now, tinnies of Swan draught collect about the legs of the chairs. The oyster catcher is the only lone creature on the beach; his red bill deftly pokes the sand as he carefully places one foot down followed by the other.
I am driving home from work listening to local radio’s Conversations with Richard Fidler. It is one of those chatty programs you can switch on and immediately you’re engaged – like eaves dropping on a couple, deep in chat, seated next to you at a restaurant, while you await your own partner.
Tonight, when I enter the conversation, he is talking to a parasitologist, Paul Prociv, about the life cycle of the rat lung worm and how there is part of the life cycle that requires development in a snail or slug. The larvae develop for a couple of moultings in the slug before the right host (a rat) consumes the slug and then the larvae develop into wrigglers that make their way to the brain or spinal cord, on their way to a large vein which will eventually channel them to the right ventricle of the heart. If, instead of a rat eating the mollusk, a human accidentally does so, the larvae will still go on their merry way, coursing through the tissue of the human brain and spinal cord. But, in the undesired host the damage can be catastrophic, leaving the person in a coma or paralysed. All from eating a slug.
I am repulsed. I am taken in.
I think of my careless washing of the lettuce. I think how easily a little slug could slip through into the salad. Eosinophilic meningitis here we come.
The parasitologist talks about the success of parasites. How, as a group, they out number all other living things. The word derives from medieval France meaning – some one who eats at the table of another. That sounds benign enough. And mostly they’re not trying to kill you. As Richard and Paul converse on the wonders of parasites they fall upon the word “cuckoo.” And then the cuckold man – whose wife’s has had someone else’s children whilst he is busy providing for what he believes are his. And the cuckoo birds who deposit their eggs in someone else’s nest for another bird to do the work of raising.
Their conversation drifts in another direction – to Paul’s family from Russia and his father’s own escape from a Stalinist regime.
I am still on cuckoo.
The obligate brood parasite cuckoo bird places its heavy shelled egg (some times disguised and other times not) into the nest of another bird and the cuckoo’s egg hatches first. Most hatchlings are able to obliterate the other eggs – either dispatching them out of the nest or outgrowing the other chicks by squawking louder for attention and food.
The word mesmerizes over and over. The feel of it in your mouth. The look of it on the page. I think of “One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” How the word cuckoo has come to mean crazy because of its link with this book. How brilliantly does Jack Nicholson play crazy? Think “The Shining.” Redrum. That sound of the wheels of the plastic trike moving from carpet to wooden boards. You know it. How cuckoo isn’t as crazy as crazy comes. Rather it’s a fraction bit off. Tilted. Who really minds being called a “little bit cuckoo.” Maybe it’s even a kind of compliment.
Buying grog at the Coles liquor shop, after my shop for dinner (salmon, dill, cream), two drunks are buying their booze. One has two large casks of cheap wine and the other a couple of bottles of fortified. Despite being at the counter before them I am overlooked and besides I don’t really mind them being served first. I am busy spying on the one with the crutches’ gammy leg. Doing my own kind of cuckoo work. He has a busted foot. He has a dirty bandage on it. He tells me the cast has just came off today (surprising considering the colour of the bandage) but he is still worried about the sullying (my word not his) of his skin. “It’ll take time, “ I say. He says it’s been good while already. I consider asking how the cream sherry helps. But that would be straight out cuckoo.
To see how much you know. To see how much you don’t know. To stare down a bit of white paper and be confused and angered by a question that, to your eleven year old self, makes no sense and is boring. Boring equals hard.
Is confidence built by doing well in a test?
Is confidence lost by doing poorly? Where does confidence go when it is diminished and trod on? What can we do to enliven it again?
What are we testing when we test boys? Their ability to sit still, like girls. Girls are good at tests. They are good at writing neatly and making borders around their work. But some boys like to move to think. Some boys like to throw a ball while they talk. Some boys like to skate. Some boys are messy.
Failure is supposed to help us succeed later. But in the moment failure is just that. It is flattening. It deadens us to that feeling that is success. Success seems slippery. Others have it. Not us. Skipping ahead, around the corner, the girl in the colourful skirt with the pretty curls. The boy child – his body sags and his shoulders push earthward. Shoes laces dragging undone, since doing them up just wastes time that could be spent running. They will come undone once more. The nature of shoe laces. Ugh another test.
And to have to miss Hockey because of a test. No reward seems good enough. He harps on It’s so unfair. My bargaining begins – Star Trek movie and a mint choc bomb perhaps.
And what is gifted anyway? Gifted – handed to you. Unearnt. Something someone else gave you that you played no part in? Gifted through good genes. Gifted and Talented exam. GATE to the parents who, like me, might have signed their child up, hoping for a spot in an elusive school. Saying GATE somehow seems less irksome than gifted and talented. And so if you don’t get in, then you are Not gifted and Not talented. Just a regular eleven year old kid with no interest in a test on quantitative reasoning and abstract thinking. Just an ordinary kid who must go to an ordinary school with ordinary teachers. Only 2.5% of kids can be labelled Gifted and Talented, so it’s a stretch to get in.
The acronym GATE is apt. Maybe WALL would be even better. For most students the GATE is locked and high and barbed. The GATE is not open wide or welcoming. It is latched and chained and bolted. Combinations and passwords and special handshakes required. It is the beginning of difference. Is eleven too young to begin to know? Maybe this is the first real gate they have come across. You have always held the door wide for them. Perhaps you are discriminated, as I am, by steps and stairs and steep driveways. Or maybe it’s the colour of your skin and the curl of your hair that prevents your inclusion. Maybe you can’t relate to people or you relate too much. Maybe English is not your first language. You live in the wrong part of town. Maybe you are a woman.
This afternoon, after school, I must ask him to sit and look at the sample questions so the exam paper does not come as a shock tomorrow. I need to tell him to not rush the paper, in the hope he can leave the room early. Only guess if you really don’t know and have no time to try to work it out. I already know it will be a battle to get him to look at the samples. When the sun is shining and friends are meeting at the park it is less than alluring to ponder a puzzle your mother looks pained to make you do.
Don’t know if you even noticed but, over Easter, my site went down. No little chook house…
It was a blank white page with the gobbly gook words Error Establishing Database in big black letters written across the top. Of course this means nothing to me. I don’t even know what a Database is. I don’t want to know either.
But ignorance of these things leads to panic when you are left trying to fix it. All I could think was that my blog had evaporated and how sad that made me feel. I love my blog. My little bit of internet heaven. I did a google search. I got help from help and support pages but there were too many slashes and dots and commas and semi colons. I could feel it making my heart beat race.
When the internet company fixed it for me just moments ago – I don’t know what the man did. He sent me a smiley face.
When you write a blog and you check your statistics you can see how people ended up on your site. You can see a list of search engine terms readers put into Google to end up pecking thechookhouse floor.
Like when they have searched for Guns. Imagine their dismay when they end up reading of small boys collecting branches and bits of old wood. Of a balcony full of adults while below on the dunes children run amok searching out wood for pistols and rifles freshly washed up from the sea and dropped from the Pines. This is because I wrote a piece about small boys marauding with stick guns on our holiday isle, Rottnest Island, and called it Young Guns. No doubt people searching for guns were not meaning this innocent, old fashioned play with driftwood.
Also having written about my son leaving his Montessori school I have found people searching for; Are Montesorri children weird? My short answer is No. And perhaps a little affronted – how dare they? They are ordinary kids given a chance to learn in a non-competitive environment. They are self-determined, love to learn for learning’s sake and think tests and bells and a scheduled morning tea are a little strange. Because Montessori schooling is not the norm in Australia it has been mystified by those who don’t know it and people get an impression it is a flaky, hippy kind of education where children simply do as they please. This is the view of people outside of Montessori.
Jasper sees the difference in his new school. He sees that kids are less attentive to learning, need to be reigned in constantly by teachers and show little self direction. Strangely, even acknowledging these inadequacies, he is happy at his new government school. He likes the bigger social engagement. He likes the soft ball at lunch time and the kicking around the playground waiting for the bell to signal the start of the day. He tells me he is one of the four in the class to get all his spelling correct, something he would have had no notion of previously.
Montessori has given him resilience to work independently, something that is well ingrained in him now and hopefully cannot be eroded.
But if there are people searching this query perhaps there is some truth in the belief. Perhaps it is weird to not be motivated by tests and gold stars. Perhaps we are so used to pushing children to strive and do better and beat their peers we don’t know how good they are at pushing themselves. My conclusion is that parents are weird. Being a parent is weird. Being weird is weird. I am weird.
So now if someone is again searching whether or not Montessori kids are weird, the first place they might end up is here. Not weird, just given a different way of looking at what it is to learn.
Having almost completed Feb fast- a month without alcohol; I am wondering what else I could do without…
Anger, frustration, voice raising. If I could have a serene household without the morning yelling; get your shoes on, brush your teeth, have you got your hat? If I could channel more zen.
I could go without chocolate or dessert. Because if push comes to shove I don’t really care about them.
What I couldn’t go without is tea. Made in a pot from water boiled in a kettle. A green enamel kettle that whistles, screamingly, when it is ready. The tea pot is a Zero, made in Japan. It holds the tea leaves in a sieve suspended in the water. It is almost spherical, black with a stainless silver lid. The tea is fine leaf ceylon. It makes strong tea. No herbs or petals. No scents. Just tea. The water is turned molasses brown. It is sweetened a tad with raw sugar and a dash of milk. It is hot and soothing. It is calming. It is tea.
Seeing the teacher this afternoon. Guts in a knot. Ate one biscuit. Wanted another. Stopped myself.
Took a photo of it instead.
Yesterday Jasper left his hat in his bag in the corridor at lunch time so could not go out in the sun. He sat undercover and watched the others running amok. No Hat No Play. The classroom is locked at lunch time. A no go zone. Perhaps this is because children might graffiti or vandalise. Perhaps someone might turn the word on the black board from lock to fuck. Even a girl.
When I tried to access my blog this morning the screen was white. As the driven snow. Not that I know that colour living in the dry hot earth of Perth. But it was. White. Blank. Zilch. No nothing. I felt my heart rate rise. What if my blog had gone? Then where was it and how to find it? Was it lost in the cloud that is the internet? Of course fear feels worse, comes on most strongly, when we know not what we are dealing with. And for me technology beyond word processing is fearful. I don’t really understand the internet, let alone begin to know how it works. How does it store all the words we write? All the pictures we make? It is too ethereal to believe in and so when the site is white it really does seems lost completely and down a rabbit hole it has gone. To follow it would surely end in madness.
Who would miss it apart from me? I have used it as a diary, a place to store the thoughts, to practice the thing I hope one day to master. To have it read by my followers is a bonus but not something they need. It is a distraction to them, as it is to me. So what if it was lost down the whitest of white holes?
In a whoosh and a poof it is back. Magic of the most magical kind. But there is a need now to print stuff. Just in case. To save it in a word document on another thumb drive. Because maybe…oneday…
the chook house 